As part of his keynote at The Ajax Experience in Boston earlier this week, Chris Wilson, Lead Platform Architect for the IE team (and a WaSP Microsoft Task Force member), revealed that Internet Explorer 7 was downloaded about 3 million times within the first four days of its release. He also offered that, according to Microsoft’s own numbers, 90% of the Windows web share is running [Windows] XP, which goes a long way toward relieving concerns that Microsoft’s plan to only offer IE7 to users of Windows XP and beyond will slow its adoption and never free us from the problematic world of IE6 support:

I think that you’ll actually see, and granted this is a little early since [it's] only been out for five days or something, … the curve on this [and it] will quickly be clear how soon we’ll get to ditch IE6 … I can’t really predict that, but I think you’ll find it’s going to be quicker than what most people expect today.

Chris also mentioned that the adoption thus-far has come without Microsoft pushing the browser update via its Windows Update service and I don’t think anyone is ruling out the possibility that Microsoft may choose to go that route, eventually.

If Chris is right (and I hope he is), this is very good news for standards-based developers. While it is true that IE7 is far from perfect, it is a much needed step on the way to a world without CSS hacks and workarounds and one with more standardized DOM support. Having also had a few off-the-record conversations with folks from the IE team attending the event, I can honestly say I feel confident that we (the standards community) have Microsoft’s ear and that they are very interested in knowing what they can do to make our lives easier now and in what they are casually referring to as “IE.Next.”

If you’re interested in seeing a snippet of video from the speech, captured by Molly, jump on over to her post on the topic.